Management Science Letters 4 (2014) 1279–1284

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Management Science Letters

homepage: www.GrowingScience.com/msl

A study on effect of big five personality traits on emotional intelligence

Hamed Dehghanana, Hadi abdollahib* and Mohammad Rezaeic

a
Assistance professor of Business Management, Allameh Tabatabei University, Tehran-Iran
b
MA of Business Management, Allameh Tabatabei University, Tehran-Iran
c
MA of Business Management, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran-Iran
CHRONICLE ABSTRACT

Article history: This paper presents a study to investigate the effects of big five personal traits on emotional
Received December 28, 2013 intelligence on some Iranian firms located in city of Tehran, Iran. The proposed study uses two
Received in revised format April questionnaires, one, which is originally developed by McCare and Costa (1992) [McCrae, R.
15 2014
R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1992). Discriminant validity of NEO-PI-R facet scales. Educational and
Accepted April 18 2014
Available online Psychological Measurement, 52, 229-237.] for measuring personality traits and the other, which
April 23 2014 is used for measuring emotional intelligence . The first questionnaire consists of five personal
Keywords: categories including extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability versus
Personality neuroticism, and openness. Using structural equation modeling and stepwise regression model,
Big Five personality trait the study has detected a positive and meaningful relationship between four components namely,
Emotional intelligence extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness as well as openness and emotional intelligence.
In addition, the study detects a negative and meaningful relationship between neuroticism and
emotional intelligence.
© 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction and literature review

Personality is an abstract concept and different experts have provided various definitions for it. Most
scholars emphasize that personality is a combination of thoughts, emotions and motivation of
individuals. In a comprehensive definition, personality is an interpersonal dynamic structure, which
includes physical and psychological systems and the component provides individuals’ thoughts and
behaviors characteristic (Allport, 1961). Personality normally deals with individual differences
among people in behavior patterns, cognition and emotion. Different personality theorists present
their own definitions and description of the word based on their theoretical positions. Personality is
usually divided into various components called the Big Five; namely openness to experience,
conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (or emotionality). These components
are stable over time and seem to be attributable to a person’s genetics rather than the impacts of one’s
*Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: Hadiabdollahi34@yahoo.com (H. Abdollahi)

© 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi: 10.5267/j.msl.2014.4.016

 
 
 
 
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environment. There are some investigations on whether the relationship between happiness and
extraversion seen in adults could also be observed among children. These achievements help identify
children that are more likely to experience episodes of depression and develop various kinds of
treatment that such children would likely to respond to. In both children and adults, many studies
indicate that genetics, as opposed to environmental factors, exert a bigger impact on happiness levels.
According to McLarnon and Carswell (2013), stability in the measurement of personality plays
essential role on its construct and predictive validity. The personality differentiation implies that
intelligence could be a threat to the measurement of personality. McLarnon and Carswell (2013)
constructed on existing literature by applying multi-group confirmatory factor analytic measurement
invariance methods to the item-level responses of a commonly applied personality inventory. In
contrast to recently published findings, their results recommend that the measurement of personality
is not the same across intelligence levels. These results have important implications for the
implementation of personality in research and practice. They maintained that personality measures
are still important predictors of key criteria.

Laverdière et al. (2013) evaluated the factor structure and the measurement invariance of the Mini-
International Personality Item Pool (Mini-IPIP), which was a brief instrument evaluating personality
traits based on the Big Five models. Two samples were gathered comprising nearly 800 participants
and using confirmatory factor reported that a five-factor solution were consistent with the Big Five
model.

Schell and Oswald (2013) presented a study investigating the effect of item order in personality
measurement on reliability, measurement equivalence and scale-level correlations. In their survey, a
big sample of university students filled one of three forms of the International Personality Item Pool
version of the Big Five personality inventory: items sorted at random, items sorted by factor, and
items cycled through factors. Their findings indicated that the underlying measurement model and the
internal consistency of the IPIP-Big Five scale was not impacted by differences in item order. In
addition, most of the scale-level correlations among factors were not substantially different across
forms.

Recent studies have found that some personality disorders (PDs) increase the persistence of several
Axis I disorders. Vergés et al. (2013) aimed to extend published analyses to the case of anxiety
disorders and to detect the robustness of the associations in order to investigate examining time-of-
measurement effects. They reported a robust pattern of higher odds ratios for post-diction among PDs
assessed at baseline, and lower odds ratios for post-diction among PDs evaluated at follow-up,
recommending a time of measurement artifact.

Dobewall et al. (2014) performed an investigation in order to find out whether we can judge other
people’s values precisely, or values are too subjective for evaluation. They compared self-other
agreement in personal values with agreement in the Big Five personality traits. The results
recommended that people could evaluate values of others whom they know well with remarkable
accuracy. Therefore, other-ratings of personal values can be applied to validate and complement self-
report value measures.

2. The proposed study

This paper presents a study to investigate the effects of key personal characteristics on emotional
intelligence on some Iranian firms located in city of Tehran, Iran. The proposed study uses the
questionnaire developed by McCare and Costa (1992). The questionnaire consists of five personal
categories including extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability versus
neuroticism, and openness on emotional intelligence. Fig. 1 demonstrates the structure of the
proposed study
 H. Dehghanan et all. / Management Scieence Letters 4 (2014) 12881

N
Neuroticism

Extraversion

Openness Emotional intelliggence

A
Agreeableness

Connscientiousness

Fig. 1. T
The proposeed study
Based
B on thhe Fig. 1, thee following five hypothheses are co
onsidered,

1. Neurroticism inffluences neggatively on emotional intelligence

i .
2. Extrraversion inffluences po
ositively on emotional intelligence
i .
3. Opennness influeences positiively on em
motional inteelligence.
4. Agreeeableness influences
i positively
p onn emotional intelligencce.
5. Conscientiousness influencces positiveely on emotiional intellig
gence.

To
T measure the effects of emotion nal intelligennce, we usee a question
nnaire develloped by Brradberry andd
Greaves
G (20006). In adddition, to measure
m peersonality trraits we usee the questtionnaire deeveloped byy
McCare
M andd Costa (19992). The poopulation off the surveyy covers all people whoo live in cityy of Tehrann,
Iran
I and woork for diffe ferent types of organizzations such h as hospitaals, post offfice, etc. Th
herefore, wee
have,
h
pq (1))
N  Z 2 / 2 2 ,
e
where
w N is tthe sample size,
s p 1  q represent
nts the probaability, z / 2 is CDF of nnormal distrribution andd
finally
f  is the error term.
t For our
o study w we assume p  0.5, z / 2  1.96 and ee=0.05, thee number of
sample
s size is calculated as N=38 84. We havee distributed 415 questionnaires aand manageed to collecct
384
3 properlyy filled onees. In our su urvey, 289 pparticipants were male and 97 of tthem were female. Figg.
1 shows othher personal characterisstics of the pparticipants.

54 76 39 65 84
4
72

144 112
2 302
0
210

18‐‐24 25‐‐34 35‐‐‐44 45‐‐54 <==12 16 18 22 Single Married

Age Yeears of educcation Marital stattus

Fig. 1. Personal
P chaaracteristicss of the partticipants
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As we can observe from the results of Fig. 1, most participants were married and highly educated.
Table 1 shows some basic statsitics associated with the proposed study of this paper.

Table 1
The summary of Cronbach alpha and AVE
Item Variable Cronbach alpha AVE Mean factor loading
1 Neuroticism 0.85 0.56 0.62
2 Extraversion 0.74 0.63 0.65
3 Openness 0.71 0.55 0.63
4 Agreeableness 0.75 0.72 0.58
5 Conscientiousness 0.73 0.51 0.62
6 Emotional intelligence 0.88 0.54 0.66
Total 0.77

Table 2 demonstrates the results of some basic statistics associated with structural equation modeling
(SEM).

Table 2
The summary of some basic statistics associated with the SEM implementation
Statistics χ/df GFI RMSEA CFI AGFI NFI NNFI
Value 2.116 0.93 0.093 0.95 0.84 0.96 0.98
Limit <3 >0.9 <0.1 >0.9 >0.8 >0.9 >0.9

Based on the results of Table 2, all statistics are within desirable levels and we may use the results of
structural equation modeling to examine the hypotheses of the survey. The implementation of
Kolmogorov–Smirnov test indicates that all data are normally distributed and we may use Pearson
correlation test to verify the relationships between various components.
3. The results
In this section, we present details of our findings on testing various hypotheses of the survey. We first
present details of our Pearson test to verify the relationships between various components and they
are shown in Table 3 as follows,
Table 3
The summary of Pearson correlation test between emotional intelligence and personality traits
Variable Extraversion Agreeableness Conscientiousness Neuroticism Openness
Pearson correlation 0.629** 0.582** 0.531** -0.534** 0.559
Sig. 0.000 0.016 0.000 0.018 0.044
**Sig. < 0.01

The results of Pearson correlation test indicate that there were some positive and meaningful
relationships between Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness as well as Openness with
emotional intelligence. In addition, there is a negative and meaningful relationship between
Neuroticism and emotional intelligence when the level of significance is five percent. We have also
performed stepwise regression method to study the effects of various factors on emotional
intelligence and Table 4 demonstrates the results of our survey.

Table 4
The results of stepwise regression analysis (Dependent variable: Emotional intelligence)
Variable Coefficient (β) t-value Sig. Result
Extraversion 0.448 10.034 0.000 Confirmed
Agreeableness 0.286 4.638 0.000 Confirmed
Conscientiousness 0.235 5.29 0.000 Confirmed
Neuroticism -0.165 2.453 0.014 Confirmed
Openness 0.137 2.285 0.016 Confirmed
R-Square = 0.738
 H. Dehghanan et al. / Management Science Letters 4 (2014) 1283

As we can observe from the results of Table 4, four independent variables influence on emotional
intelligence, positively and one influences on emotional intelligence negatively. Therefore, we can
confirm all hypotheses of the survey.

4. Discussion and conclusion

In this paper, we have performed an empirical investigation to study the effects of different factors;
namely Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability versus Neuroticism, and
Openness on emotional intelligence. The study has accomplished among people who were employed
with various industries in city of Tehran, Iran. The results have indicated that being extraversion is
the most important factor on development of emotional intelligence followed by being agreeableness.
The results of the survey are consistent with findings of Petrides and Furnham (2001), Dawda and
Hart (2000), Diener and Lucas (1999), Rusting and Larsen (1997), Saklofske et al. (2003), Schutte et
al. (1998) and Watson, D. (2000).

Correlation between extraversion as well as neuroticism and emotional intelligence, respectively, in

terms of specificity and regulation is justified by setting a positive mood, negative mood.
Extraversion and Neuroticism represent the tendency to experience positive and negative emotions.
These two tendencies, which can result to two positive and negative attitudes is correlated with
emotional intelligence. In addition, the correlation between experience and flexibility, compatibility
and conscientiousness and emotional intelligence can be adjusted depending on the overlap between
the components of emotional intelligence involves feelings and emotions, implementation and
evaluation of the efficiency of the emotions and passions and traits related sub-taking experienced.
The results showed that the dimensions of extraversion and neuroticism could change the order of
emotional intelligence both positively and negatively. Extroversion increases the willingness to
experience pleasurable events. Extraversion also predisposes individuals to experience positive
emotions. This preparation can help a person appear to be more efficient, especially in the area of
personal and social relationships.

In terms of the main components of emotional intelligence, these competencies can operate in three
dimensions. In terms of emotion and excitement of extroversion, it can underlie the increased
experience events and emotions towards enjoyable and positive actions, which could contribute to
emotional intelligence. In the application and efficiency of the emotions, extroversion and emotional
intelligence by strengthening mechanisms allowing the person to be to improve and develop social
relationships and emotions. Obviously, this doubles the efficiency by making a positive impact on
both sides of the equation governing the relationships benefit. After evaluating emotions,
extroversion through increased positive feelings and enjoyable experiences, the conditions are more
relaxed and more optimistic to assess their emotions. On the other hand, neuroticism increases
people’s tendencies towards having more stressful events and increases people’s talent for having
negative events. Therefore, the people will become more vulnerable against people’s daily activities.
Other characteristics including a tendency to experience anxiety, tension, hostility, low top, irrational
thoughts, depression and low self-esteem can also be a part of one's abilities to have a negative
impact on social relationships and emotions.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for constructive comments on earlier version
of this paper.
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